Depressingly substandard narration leading an otherwise talented cast in an excellent story.

As an established fan of the Murderbot Diaries series, in both ebook and unabridged audiobook, I was delighted by the concept of GraphicAudio's full cast adaptations.

I used that past tense for a reason. I've been increasingly disappointed by the adaptations in question, and sadly, "Rogue Protocol" is the least impressive to date.

There is a large and mainly very talented cast involved in producing these "live audio" versions of MBD, and they, and the excellent stories, are the reason I stuck with GraphicAudio's versions long enough to buy this one too. I've been introduced to a number of excellent voice actors, whose work I am likely to follow up. Unfortunately, David Cui Cui is not among them, and even more unfortunately, he does most of the voice work for their MBD productions.

The voice used for our favourite SecUnit is not a bad one, per se, but not only does Cui Cui narrate so rapidly that I have to slow every audiobook in this series to 0.75-0.85 speed to be able to listen to them properly (which is something I do *not* normally need to do), he makes far too many mistakes (among which is a repetitive misnaming of one of the characters that makes me cringe, not least because he actually starts by getting it *right*!), and gives some words the most peculiar pronunciations I've ever heard - most egregious, reading "freight" as "fright", which makes no sense at all.

(I made sure to check whether this was a regional issue, and it is not.)

Add to that the "dramatic" background music that varies between all but drowning out dialogue, and confusing the ear generally, which is an especial nightmare for those of us with auditory processing disorder, and you have an audiobook I refuse to revisit. Don't get me wrong, some of the music is attractive stuff, but the audio balance is ... well, not great at times.

Much as I enjoy the story of "Exit Strategy", the next in the series, I'll be sticking with Kevin R. Free for the audio version of that, and the others hereafter.

Oh, and by the way... yes, there is *yet another* trailer for "Red Rising" at the end of this book. The exact same 4-minute trailer that they've added at the end of every GA MBD work. You don't even get a different *section* from "Red Rising" - it's the exact same thing every. single. time. I'm so sick of hearing it, by this fourth repeat, that I think I would have avoided the book even if it *hadn't* sounded like a story I'd hate.

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